...If it leaves, but stays in the EU, then these can be reduced from a level in the tens of billions to something like what Romania or Bulgaria get....

The reason, of course, the transfers can then be reduced is that a Greece out of the euro re-denominates its debt in Greekeuros--drachmas--which go to a substantial discount vis-a-vis the euro, thus devalues, begins to have an export boom, and sees a strong economic recovery. What's the problem? READ MOAR

Hoisted from Other People's Archives from Five Years Ago: Paul Krugman** (2010): The Conventional Superstition: "Calculated Risk points us to a speech by Kevin Warsh...

that strikes me as almost the perfect illustration of the predicament we’re in, in which policy is paralyzed by fear of invisible bond vigilantes. Warsh isn’t an especially bad example — but that’s the point: this is what Serious People sound like these days. The bottom line of Warsh’s speech — although expressed indirectly — is that it’s time for fiscal austerity, even though the economy remains deeply depressed; and no, the Fed can’t offset the effects of fiscal contraction with more quantitative easing. In short, the responsible thing is just to accept 10 percent unemployment. And why is this the responsible thing? On fiscal policy:

Over at Equitable Growth: Paul Krugman succumbs once again to shrill unholy madness: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Friedman R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!! This time it is over the observation that, as I put it:

John Maynard Keynes has lots of disciples--people who believe that the macroeconomy can easily destabilize itself or be easily destabilized by inept policy rules (that should keep Nick Rowe quiet);

and Friedrich von Hayek has lots of disciples--people who believe that recessions are the market's judgment upon the feckless, and that it would be both impious and counterproductive to interfere with the market, blessed be its unholy name;

but Milton Friedman's halfway house has no occupants today. Well, Scott Sumner. And James Pethokoukis. But even Nick Rowe is more a Clower-Leijonhufvud kind of guy. And Friedman's wingpersons, like Allan Meltzer and Anna Jacobsen Schwartz, became more and more Hayekian as the tide of Friedman's influence began to ebb. READ MOAR

Over at Equitable Growth: Dean Baker once again marvels at the Washington Post's inability to figure out that the calculus of debts and deficits is fundamentally different today than back in the early 1980s. When long-term interest rates on government debt are 2%/year below the growth rate of the economy, things are very different from what they are when they are 3%/year above the growth rate of the economy. READ MOAR

Live from La Farine: The slaveholders who forced through Virginia's joining the Confederacy in 1861 and the Social Darwinist libertarians of the 19th century did not pretend.

They did not go to war honorably and reluctantly because they needed to make a point of constitutional law.

They did not seek to eliminate regulation of wages an hours because the "Big Children" and "Big Slovak Immigrant" lobbies had captured the government and were imposing high rent-seeking costs on society.

In this, they were more honorable than their latter-day epigones and defenders:

"Pre-Syriza growth" was at a pace that would not return Greek real GDP to the 2007 level of the 1975-1999 trend (if you think that was Greece's "real" potential output in 2007) until... 2023. READ MOAR

Arthur Goldhammer: The Old Continent Creaks: Austerity and the failures of the technocratic elite have created the current populist backlash. France’s experience is instructive—and, possibly, ominous:

What’s the matter with Europe? Wherever one looks these days, there are signs of deep trouble. Economic growth has stagnated. Deflation threatens. Unemployment is rampant in many member states of the European Union. Support for the former mainstream parties of the center-right and center-left is waning. Populist parties of the far right and far left are on the rise. Anti-Islamic movements such as PEGIDA in Germany have attracted worrisome support, while in France the xenophobic National Front has topped all other parties in recent polls. Terrorist attacks by native-born citizens in Paris and Copenhagen have raised fears that the social fabric has irreparably deteriorated—fears compounded by the flight of several thousand young Europeans to join the Islamic State in Syria. And to top it all off, Ukraine has been racked by civil war and threatened with disintegration since Russian-backed separatists rejected the rule of the government in Kiev.

In looking up some sources for my previous post on the gold-exchange standard, I checked, as I like to do from time to time, my old copy of The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises. Mises published The Theory of Money and Credit in 1912 (in German of course) when he was about 31 years old, a significant achievement. In 1924 he published a second enlarged edition addressing many issues that became relevant in the aftermath the World War and the attempts then underway to restore the gold standard. So one finds in the 1934 English translation of the 1924 German edition a whole section of Part III, chapter 6 devoted to the Gold-Exchange Standard.

...a discussion of a fashionable view that in fact, the Greece crisis is not about the money at all, it is merely about creditors wresting political control from the concededly fucked up Greek state in order to make reforms in the long term interest of the Greek public. Anyone familiar with corporate finance ought to be immediately skeptical of this claim. A state cannot be liquidated. In bankruptcy terms, it must be reorganized. Corporate bankruptcy laws wisely limit the control rights of unconverted creditors during reorganizations, because creditors have no interest in maximizing the value of firm assets. Their claim to any upside is capped, their downside is large, they seek the fastest possible exit that makes them mostly whole. The incentives of impaired creditors are simply not well aligned with maximizing the long-term value of an enterprise.

...in terms of wage-units by decreasing the wage-unit increases proportionately the burden of debt; whereas the method of producing the same result by increasing the quantity of money whilst leaving the wage unit unchanged has the opposite effect. Having regard to the excessive burden of many types of debt, it can only be an inexperienced person who would prefer the former...

...may exert an inadequate influence over the long-term rate of interest [to restore full employment], whilst an immoderate increase may offset its other advantages by its disturbing effect on confidence...

Over at Equitable Growth: There is, I think, a profound reason why those who have been able to understand the business cycle over the past two centuries have been those who have defined themselves as doing "monetary economics", and those who have not been able to understand the business cycle have not...

Let us remember the days when the Old New Republic, under the ownership of Marty Peretz and the editorship of Franklin Foer put forward people who are, shall we say, not very quantitative to make "the case against Keynes... [and] Krugman", and for austerity.

Samuel Brittan--who I believe is extremely perceptive and penetrating (although not at all unsympathetic)--on Friedrich Hayek. From 'Hayek, Freedom, and Interest Groups,' in The Role and Limits of Government (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1983):

The first page of the first chapter of Hayek's own Constitution of Liberty starts with the sentence:

We are concerned in this book with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible.

How much smarter Schumpeter is than our modern liquidationists and austerians--he says a great many true things in and amongst the chaff, which is created by his fundamentally mistaken belief that structural adjustment must be triggered by a downturn and a wave of bankruptcies that releases resources into unemployment. How much more fun and useful it would be right now to be debating a Schumpeter right now than the ideologues calling for, say, more austerity for and more unemployment in Greece!

How very strange it is for Schumpeter to be laying out his depressions-cause-structural-change-and-growth theory of business cycles at the very same moment that he is also laying out his entrepreneurs-disrupt-the-circular-flow-and-cause-structural-change-and-growth-theory of enterprise. It is, of course, the second that is correct: Growth comes from entrepreneurs pulling resources into the sectors, enterprises, products, and production methods of the future. It does not come from depressions pushing resources into unemployment. Indeed, as Keynes noted, times of depression and fear of future depression are powerful brakes halting Schumpeterian entrepreneurship: "If effective demand is deficient... the individual enterpriser... is operating with the odds loaded against him. The game of hazard which he plays is furnished with many zeros.... Hitherto the increment of the world’s wealth has fallen short of the aggregate of positive individual savings; and the difference has been made up by the losses of those whose courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual good fortune. But if effective demand is adequate, average skill and average good fortune will be enough..."

How Schumpeter genuinely seems to have no clue at all that the business cycle is a feature of a monetary economy--how very badly indeed he needed to learn, and how he never did learn, what Nick Rowe and company teach today about the effects of monetary stringency on economic coordination.

Joseph Schumpeter (1934): [Depressions: What Can We Learn from Past Experience?](https://books.google.com/books?id=WVMUGqMU5bAC&pg=PA115&dq=schumpeter+depressions+are+not+simply+evils,+which+we+might+attempt+to+suppress&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rQ2QVZTfHsnvoASqpYaAAw&ved=0CCwQuwUwAg#v=onepage&q=schumpeter depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress&f=false)

The problems presented by periods of depression may be grouped as follows: First, removal of extra economic injuries to the economic mechanism: Mostly impossible on political grounds. Second, relief: Not only imperative on moral and social grounds, but also an important means to keep up the current of economic life and to steady demand, although no cure for fundamental cases.

Third, remedies: The chief difficulty of which lies in the fact that depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress, but--perhaps undesirable--forms of something which has to be done, namely, adjustment to previous economic change.

How long does it take to go from the short run to the long run? As I say repeatedly, I used to teach my students that the "short run" was the next couple of years, that the long run was from seven years from now on out, and that in between were interesting and confused medium-run transition dynamics--plus there is always the possibility that forward-looking expectations can lead the long run to come like a thief in the night, suddenly, immediately, long before you expect it to.

Section 18031 [of the Affordable Care Act--i.e., the ObamaCare Law--] provides that “[e]ach State shall . . . establish an American Health Benefit Exchange..." [But] if [a] State chooses not to do so, Section 18041 provides that the Secretary [of Health and Human Services] “shall . . . establish and operate such Exchange..." (emphasis added [by Roberts]).... The phrase “such Exchange”... instructs the Secretary to establish and operate the same Exchange that the State was directed to establish.... Black’s Law Dictionary 1661... (defining “such” as “That or those; having just been mentioned”).... State Exchanges and Federal Exchanges are equivalent—they must meet the same requirements, perform the same functions, and serve the same purposes...

A simple matter of black-letter law, no? The plain meaning of the phrase "such Exchange" means that anything legal that is true of a health-insurance exchange established by, say, the state of New York is also true of a health-insurance exchange established by the federal government for, say, the state of Florida if the state of Florida fails to establish its exchange, no?

...and with low yields on government bonds and railway shares paying handsome dividends, the desire to speculate spread—as one observer put it, ‘the contagion passed to all, and from the clerk to the capitalist the fever reigned uncontrollable and uncontrolled’ (Francis’s History of the Bank of England). And so began railway mania.

Five years ago I put a tickler in to see what would happen to this. Glad to see that sanity reigned after all:

Wikipedia: Mirror Worlds: "Mirror Worlds Technologies, Inc. was a company based in New Haven, Connecticut, which created software using ideas from the book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (1992) by Yale professor David Gelernter, who helped found the company with Eric Freeman and served as chief scientist. Gelernter believed that computers can free users from being filing clerks by organizing their data. The company's main product, Scopeware, was released in March 2001 and attempted to organize a user's files into time-based 'streams' and make such data more easily accessible across networks and a variety of devices. The company saw few sales, and announced it would 'cease operations effective May 15, 2004'.

From 2002 to 2006, the share of the American economy devoted to residential construction rose by 1.2 percentage points of GDP above its previous trend value, before plunging as the United States entered the greatest economic crisis in nearly a century. According to my rough calculations, the excess investment in the housing sector during this period totaled some $500 billion – by any measure a tiny fraction of the world economy at the time of the crash.